ABSTRACT
I belong to a generation of Armenians who were born in Istanbul, Turkey, and raised in the aftermath of the World War I Armenian Genocide. As in the case of many others of my generation, my life bore the brunt of the impact of many of the devastations associated with that genocide. Apart from losing several family members, mainly paternal and maternal grandparents, I had to vicariously experience the unabating anguishes stemming from the trauma the surviving members of my family had to endure for the rest of their lives. The despair of these survivors was further aggravated by the fact that from the prewar station of relative wealth they abruptly were cast into the abyss of abject poverty. Unable to cope with the hardships issuing from this debilitating condition, many of them languished in misery and bitterness. My childhood memories are punctuated by images of scenes where groups of female survivors on certain occasions would gather together and the conversations would always revolve around “the massacres.” Reliving the horrors of the genocide, they then would burst forth with loud sobbing and lapse into uncontrollable bewailments. One of these survivors related a particularly gruesome detail of massacre. After liquidating the men of her village, the women and children were taken to a nearby wood where they were lined up at the edge of a large grave dug up beforehand. A Kurd, using the stump of a tree as a resting place, would chop off their heads one by one. When her turn came, to everyone’s surprise, this butcher threw off his axe in a wild scream and ran off. It was believed that he was losing his mind as he could not take it 236any more and decided to halt abruptly. The grimness of the butchery and the ghastliness of the spectacle of the carnage had impacted upon his mind and nerves. So, the remaining victims-to-be escaped slaughter through decapitation.
